Light-skinned privilege dominated Black leadership even in antiracist circles

Evidence

It was probably the silliest statement of Du Bois’s serious career. He sounded as oblivious as the racists who had angered him for decades by discounting the existence of the racial line. In denying the color line, Du Bois discounted the existence of color discrimination, in effect blaming darker Blacks for their disproportionate poverty. Du Bois had eyes. He knew light skins dominated the most desirable political and economic positions available to Blacks. In his own Talented Tenth essay in 1903, he had mentioned twenty-one present and past Black leaders, and all of them except Phillis Wheatley had been biracial. No Ida B. Wells-Barnett or Callie House appeared. He probably heard the circulating Black children’s rhyme: “If you’re white, you’re right / If you’re yellow, you’re mellow / If you’re brown, stick around / If you’re black, get back.” Du Bois knew that elite, light-skinned folks were still using brown paper bags and rulers to bar dark-skinned folks from churches, jobs, civic groups, historically Black colleges, Black fraternities and sororities, and even neighborhoods and other types of gatherings. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 830

Categorization

• CANDY: The children’s rhyme ‘If you’re white, you’re right…’ is a memorable, tweetable scrap of colorism history.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to color privilege as a status structure parallel to the class/status analysis in ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ — markers of hierarchy reproduced within the oppressed group.